PHARMACEUTICAL NOTICES. 
17 
symptoms* — induces me to call the attention of such as are 
unacquainted with this process to its superior advantages. 
Our U. S. Pharmacopoeia directs us to macerate a portion 
of opium, first dried, and then reduced to powder, in a cer- 
tain quantity of diluted alcohol, for the space of fourteen 
days, at the end of which time it is to be expressed and 
filtered. This is then a solution containing all the active, 
including the bad as well as the good, and also much of the 
inactive principles of opium — and hence unsuited to the 
idiosyncracy of many patients, and for administration in 
large doses, when a sedative and not a narcotic influence is 
required. 
In the desire to separate these and employ a solution of 
the good and efficient properties only of opium, many pre- 
parations have been devised as substitutes, having for their 
base morphia. A preparation much in vogue at the present 
time, and known as McM turn's Elixir of Opium, is believed 
to be a solution of meconate. of morphia, obtained from a 
* With respect to the action of'narcotiha, the prevailing opinions may 
be learned from the following extract from Pereira's Elements of 
Materia Medica. " When narcotina was first discovered, it was said 
to be the stimulant principle of opium, and Majendie states, a grain of 
it, dissolved in olive oil, produced the death of a dog in twenty-four 
hours, while twenty-four times this quantity was given, dissolved 
in acetic acid", with impunity. Orfila, atone time, declared it was inert, 
then, that it acted like morphia, and subsequently that its operation 
was remarkable and peculiar. Bally asserts that, in a solid state, it is 
inert, for 129 grains may be given at one :dose*, without exerting any 
obvious effect. The truth is, I believe,. that narcottna possesses but little 
activity, and I presume, therefore, that the first experimenters with it 
employed an impure substance. Dr. Roots gave gradually increased 
doses of it up to a scruple, without the least injury. The bitterness of 
its sulphuric solution led him to employ it in intermittents, as a substi- 
tute for disulphate of quina. More recently, attention has been drawn 
to it in India, by Dr. O'Shaughnessy {Brit, and For. Med. Rev., Vol. 
viii. p. 263,) as an Indian indigenous substitute for quina, and nearly 
200 cases of intermittent and remittent fevers, treated by it. have been, 
published." — Ed. Amer. Journ. Pharm. 
8* 
